July 1998 Archives

When the time of Jesus' death was approaching,
he promised his community of disciples that after his death he would send the
Holy Spirit to comfort them and provide them with direction as to what they
should be doing as a Church.The
Book of Acts provides several examples of ways the early Church tried to carry
out this mission of being a faith movement led by Christ's spirit.This includes a description of their
efforts to reach common understandings of what is expected of community members
on key issues such as circumcision and Jewish dietary laws. For many years
prior to the blending of the Church with secular authority at the time of
Constantine, the Christian community stood apart from the surrounding secular
society and government on a number of major issues, including participation in
the military.

A generation or two before early Friends,
Anabaptist fellowships on the Continent attempted to recreate this earliest
form of church community both in terms of radical expectations of its members
set apart from secular society and in terms of the methodology of community
decision-making and discipline.

The first unique dimension of Fox's ministry was
to proclaim the possibility of a direct, ongoing relationship with Christ as
teacher and leader of the faith community.The second unique dimension of his ministry was to establish
a system of church governance that institutionalized this relationship with the
inward living Spirit of Christ in terms of corporate decision-making and
discipline.The structure of
monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings offered a practical method by which
Friends could discern the will of God in decisions facing the community. This
included the position which the community was to take on key social questions
such as payment of "tithes" that supported the established Church of
England and whether Friends should participate in the military.

One of the key reasons why Fox and other early
Quaker leaders established this system was to provide a mechanism by which
individual Friends' leadings could be tested and either approved or disowned by
the larger Quaker community.This
became an issue when some Friends (such as Naylor and his Bristol followers)
engaged in forms of public witness that were profoundly disturbing to many
other Friends.Another reason for
establishing organizational structure to the early movement was to organize
support for those who suffered persecution for following through on their
Quaker faith.The main original
reason, for example, for establishing meeting membership rolls was to have an
organized way of identifying individual families who should be provided
financial support as a result of religious persecution.This was necessary in part because
Friends had rejected adult water baptism as the outward ceremony marking a
boundary between members and non-members utilized by the Anabaptist
communities.(This is the origin
of the name for Britain Yearly Meeting's interim meeting as "Meeting for
Sufferings".)

This ongoing intimate relationship between the
individual Friend, the larger larger Quaker community and the living spirit of
Christ remains at the heart of Quakerism to this day.This interplay can be summarized as follows:

l. INDIVIDUAL LEADINGS. The first question that
an individual Friend must ask her/himself is: "What do I believe God is
telling me to do?"

Individual Friends feel leadings to carry out
their faith in many particular ways, including the leading to carry a
"concern" to other Meetings or to carry out acts of conscience which
may violate secular law. Such a leading may in some cases take the individual
Friend into new territory which Friends have not as yet recognized as acts of
conscience or obedience to God's voice.

2. CLEARNESS & CORPORATE SUPPORT FOR
INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS. Are
we as a Quaker community able to unite in believing that God is in fact telling
this individual to carry out this action?

The meeting tests the authenticity of the
leading which its member feels drawn to and either unites with it (often
expressed through writing a traveling minute or a minute of support) or is
unable to do so.The Friend may or
may not go ahead and carry out the leading without the support of the
community.A committee of clearness
may meet with the Friend to assist with the individual Friend's discernment
process and the Meeting's process of discerning whether to unite with the
individual's leading.

Individual Friends may be far ahead of the rest
of the meeting in terms of what they see as holy obedience.Individual meetings may also be at a
very different place than their yearly meeting.And various yearly meetings today have very different
understandings of what they are prepared to recognize as authentic expressions
of obedience to God's will.Such
differing understandings of God's voice have been present since the beginnings
of Quakerism. Two early conflicts among Friends were over whether to schedule
regular beginning times for worship and whether men should remove their hats
when someone prayed out loud during meeting for worship.

Although Friends today like to "claim"
the Underground Railroad as a shining example of Quaker faithfulness, the large
majority of Friends at the time did not support either abolitionism or
violation of fugitive slave laws.This led during the early 19th century to separations by Friends in
several yearly meetings who were uneasy with the reluctance of their yearly
meeting to take a more forceful position in opposition to slavery. Benjamin Lay
was read out of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for the colorful and forceful
manner in which he communicated his concern about slavery to other
Friends.

Although Friends led to take a draft
noncooperation position since 1940 initially encountered lukewarm support or
even active resistance from their Meetings, support for this stance became stronger
and stronger during the Vietnam War years especially among unprogrammed
Friends.Many Friends read letters
of support from their monthly or yearly meetings during their draft trials.The same evolution in the response from
the wider Quaker community has also occurred for Friends led to refuse taxation
supporting the military during this century.

Some of the other forms of support offered to
individual Friends during the Vietnam War include: offering symbolic sanctuary
in the meetinghouse to a member at the time of arrest, attendance of and
testimony at trials, prison visiting and support for families of imprisoned
Friends, and the "Sufferings Column" printed for a number of years in
the Friends Journal.Meetings have
also "released" members at times though providing financial support
for them to pursue work they feel called tocarry out.

3. CORPORATE GUIDANCE TO THE MEETING'S
MEMBERS.
Can the meeting unite in believing that God is telling it to call upon ALL its
members to take (or at least seriously consider taking) a certain stand--as
opposed to simply supporting individual Friends called to take that position?

Friends have traditionally utilized the Bible,
Friends writings, and the corporate experience of other Quaker and Christian
groups to assist them in the process of hearing together in the present what
God is telling them is required of them.These sources are not always clear in what they suggest God is saying to
the community.As a result, it
often takes a considerable period of time for Friends to move from support for
individual concern to full unity around the position originally taken by a few
individual Friends. It took a century of contentious struggle, for example, for
Friends to reach unity around the unacceptability of slave owning by Friends.
We may well forget as we struggle to hear what the Bible is offering as
guidance today on issues from war tax refusal to same gender sexuality how many
biblical passages were cited over the centuries justifying the practice of
"kindly" slave-owning.

The classic ultimate expression of unity once it
has been attained is a statement on the subject in the yearly meeting's Book of
Discipline.

A conference on the subject of conscription was
called at Earlham College in 1968 that was attended by representatives
appointed by a large number of yearly meetings.The new Richmond Declaration on Military Conscription agreed
upon by this gathering expressed strong opposition to military conscription and
offered strong and unequivocal support BOTH for those called to accept
conscientious objector status and those called to the noncooperation position.This conference represented a kind of
watershed shift in the corporate position of Friends from an earlier position
heavily weighted towards the cooperating C.O. position.

As yet, few Friends bodies have moved from
support for individual Friends war tax resisters to statements asking all Friends to wrestle with
the incompatibility of opposition to war and paying for it.

4. PUBLIC CORPORATE WITNESS.Is the meeting able to unite in
believing that God is asking it to communicate its position to the wider non-Quaker
community around it?

This is presumably the basic source of the term
"Testimony", although the term is used today to refer both to the
public aspects of the corporate position and the internal expectations placed
upon members. Some of the ways in which Friends expressed their public
opposition to war during the period included: the public offers of
"sanctuary" mentioned above, letters to the media, letters and
delegations to public officials, and publication of books and pamphlets expressing
Friends' position on the issues.Friends were increasingly willing as the Vietnam War progressed to join
with a wide variety of church, pacifist and other antiwar groups in attempting
to mobilize opposition to the war and the draft.This was in sharp contrast to the relatively limited
attempts by Friends to influence broader public opinion during other wars in
the past.

5. CORPORATE ACTION BY THE MEETING.Can members unite in believing that God
is asking the meeting to carry out action as a group as an expression of one of
the community's corporate testimonies in a given area?

Many monthly meetings, yearly meetings, and
Quaker organizations wrestled with whether they could as corporate bodies
directly carry out actions in violation of law.Examples included willingness to send medical supplies to
all sides in Vietnam, willingness to honor employees' requests that their
salaries not be withheld for federal income taxes, and active support for those
led to leave the military during time of war.A number of yearly meetings were in fact able to unite on
such actions, though only after considerable struggle and conflict.

There have been many other examples of meetings
wrestling with similar issues of corporate action since that time.Many meetings wrestled with whether to
hold onto investments in South Africa under apartheid.Some meetings today make it a matter of
principle to avoid use of paper products, Styrofoam or plastic utensils as an
expression of their understanding of our new unfolding testimony on unity with
nature.The question of whether to
hold a ceremony of commitment for a same gender couple is particularly
challenging for many meetings precisely because it represents corporate action
by the meeting rather than merely an abstract position on the issue of same
gender relationships.

6. INTERNAL TEACHING TO MEMBERS. How does the community
communicate to its own members (including especially children raised within the
group and new converts) the positions that it feels are important?

Differing religious communions utilize a variety
of similar methods from religious education, camps, religious youth
organizations, voluntary service projects, and rituals surrounding rites of
passage such as first communion, first baptism, and confirmation.Amish churches set up youth fellowships
to help maintain interest in the church community prior to an adult decision to
join, but then struggle when those fellowships engage in practices contrary to
church beliefs.(For example,
several members of such an Amish youth group were arrested recently for selling
hard drugs to other members of their group.)Friends in Philadelphia Yearly wrestled for years with the
question of whether to permit smoking at Young Friends gatherings for similar
reasons. The upshot is, however, that if a community cannot effectively
communicate to new members its deeply held convictions, it will either die out
or no longer stand for those values it once held dear.

The Peace Churches have had widely varying
degrees of success in communicating the importance of non-participation in the
armed forces to their draft-age male members in different wars. Different
branches of Friends have often placed very different emphasis on what kinds of
behavior are considered essential to being a Friend and what behaviors are
considered "optional extras".

7. DISCIPLINE OF MEMBERS.What action does the faith community
take if individual members fail to practice the teachings of the group?

Several examples are given in the Book of Acts
of ways a religious community can handle failure by its members to follow its
teachings.These efforts are
rooted in the foundational teaching of Christ given in Matthew that when a
member of the community strays from the community's principles that bind it
together, it should be handled first through one-to-one private discussion. If
this fails, then a meeting with two or three other members of the community, is
to be arranged. Only after these steps have been attempted is a question of
"discipline" to be brought to the community as a whole.

Presumably Friends follow this practice today:
beginning with informal one-to-one communication of concern, proceeding to
private discussion with a few other individual members, next taking the matter
to an official committee such as overseers or worship and counsel, and finally
bringing the matter to the attention of monthly meeting itself.

The ultimate form of discipline for Catholics is
excommunication, which means banning the incalcitrant member from receiving the
rite of communion.An important
method of discipline for some Anabaptist groups is "shunning", which
involves members in good standing being asked to stop socializing with the
member who has violated church teaching.

There are two ultimate forms of discipline which
have been practiced traditionally by Friends. The first is being read out of
meeting, through which the monthly meeting decides to remove a member from its
rolls.

The second is disownment.Disownment technically means something
quite different from removal from membership, although the terms are often used
interchangably among Friends today. The term disownment originally referred to
the public
action of witnessing to the surrounding non-Quaker community that the action of
a person who claims to be a Friend is, in the meeting's understanding,
inconsistent with Quaker practice and testimony.The purpose of disownment is essentially evangelical - that
is, to maintain the clarity of the Quaker message to the world.The practice has largely fallen into
disfavor - perhaps in part because of the frequency with which different
Friends groups disowned each other during the 19th century schisms.

Concern among many liberal Friends about Richard
Nixon's Quaker membership illustrates well the difficult issues around reading
out and disownment.Friends
outside of California YM who were deeply uneasy with Richard Nixon's active
leadership of the nation in prosecuting a war clearly lacked authority to tell
East Whittier Meeting or California YM what they should do concerning his
actual membership.They certainly
did have the option, some might say the obligation, of communicating in a
loving and respectful manner their concerns to Nixon's own meeting what effect
they saw Nixon's publicly recognition as a Friend having on the clarity of
Friends' testimony against war.

In the end, however, disownment is not in the
end an issue of membership but of witness.Therefore, it does not seem inappropriate to the basic idea
of disownment that in some extreme instances (such as Friend Nixon) a yearly
meeting might feel called to communicate to the public that the behavior in
question seems to it to violate core tenets of Quaker belief.

A meeting which publicly distances itself from
the actions of Friends from another Quaker group must, of course, be prepared
to accept the possibility that other Friends groups may feel called, in turn,
to distance themselves from other actions of their meeting or its
members.There is a real danger
that Friends today could be drawn into another process of mutual disownment
over difficult issues such as same gender commitments.

INDIVIDUALISM AND
20TH CENTURY FRIENDS

Friends and Buddhists have classically leaned
more heavily towards individual conscience while certain other religious
communities like Anabaptists and Catholics have leaned more towards corporate
discipline.This difference is
illustrated by the discussion following a presentation that a Friend made to an
ecumenical course on spiritual direction on the Quaker practice of clearness
committees.The non-Friends
present were deeply intrigued and drawn to the practice.One asked what happens when the group
and the individual Friend reach different conclusions at the end as to what God
is asking the individual to do. Her expectation (based on her own faith
community's approach to corporate discernment and discipline) was that the
individual Friend would follow the direction of the clearness committee.The Friend making the presentation
surprised many of the non-Friends present by confessing that in most cases the
individual Friend would probably go ahead and do what she or he felt was right.

In fact, corporate discipline seems to be little
exercised among Friends in this century.Some view this fact as a strong pendulum swing away from overly severe
exercise of discipline by meetings on issues like marrying out in the 19th
century.Some see it as the
influence of rampant individualism ("Do your own thing") in the surrounding
secular society.Still others see
this as a healthy and natural evolution towards respect for diversity of
personal discernment.

Very few Meetings, if any, read out members for
military participation during the Vietnam War.I expect that even gentler forms of discipline have been
fairly rare in many meetings during this century for military
participation.There have been
Friends meetings that have exercised stronger corporate discipline in response
to social taboos such as dancing than towards participation in war.Mid-America Yearly Meeting recently
revoked the recorded minister status of two of its members for public
disagreement with its stand on homosexuality. The only basis for being read out
of many liberal meetings, on the other hand, appears to be consistent failure
to attend meeting, contribute to the meeting, and to respond to letters of
inquiry from overseers.

There are actions which do sometimes put members
of liberal meetings "beyond the pale" of tolerance by their
meeting.Members whose
long-standing mental disorders lead them to consistently disrupt worship or to
seriously disrupt in other ways the life of the meeting have occasionally been
removed from membership.The same
has been true in some meetings for a member who has engaged in sexually abusive
behavior towards another member.A
member of Canada YM at the Friends and the Vietnam War gathering described the
efforts of that yearly meeting to wrestle caringly with protocols or guidelines
dealing with sexually abusive behavior which occurs within the life of the
meeting.

·Has
your meeting ever counseled or otherwise challenged a member for failure to
live out core Quaker testimonies?

·Has
it ever removed a member of your meeting from membership for anything other
than wholesale non-participation in the life of the meeting?

·Are
you aware of any other meetings in your yearly meeting which are more willing
to engage each other on such questions?

·What
area, if any, would you feel it might be positive for your meeting to exercise
discipline or offer direct guidance concerning personal behavior of its
members?

·How
could this best be approached in a way that was tender and supportive rather
than judgmental?

·Has
our deep reluctance to practice any discipline among liberal Friends weakened
the meaning of membership or our testimony to the world?

PASTORAL CARE IN
UNPROGRAMMED MEETINGS

What in fact is the best way in which members of
a religious community should approach issues of personal behavior?One of the major differences between
pastoral and non-pastoral meetings is that a pastor has access to homes in the
way that members of a non-pastoral meeting often do not.You almost have to go into members'
homes to know them well enough to communicate concerns about personal
dimensions of faithfulness in a way that is both true to the members' actual
life context and tender to their efforts to obey God in their life.

Some meetings have a practice of assigning
responsibility for each meeting family and single Friend to a member of
overseers or ministry and counsel.The idea is that this member of the meeting gets to know each of her/his
families and single members well enough to be able to recognize pastoral needs
and provide a loving and appropriate response to unhelpful or un-Friendly
behavior.My sense is that this is
a nice theoretical plan, but that such assigned overseers often find it hard to
carry out this role as intended.Both the committee members and the members of the meeting assigned to
them may feel too uncomfortable with this level of engagement with each other.

Perhaps the deeper question is:How can our meetings become the
kind of redemptive community which is touched by the Holy Spirit in a way which
changes the lives of its members - and creates the sense of deep trust and
safety necessary to wrestle together with issues of personal and corporate
faithfulness?How many of us have
ever experienced that kind of redemptive community any time during our
lives?Certainly the early church was that kind of community
- as was the early Quaker movement.

In large "super churches" today, it is
generally felt that the larger church community as a whole should be a place
for public worship, celebration and affirmation of common bonds. Issues of
personal discernment and lifestyle choices can be much more easily addressed in
much smaller ongoing face-to-face groups. Such churches often require all
members to be part of small "cells" or prayer groups who remain
together over time. There may be hundreds of these cell groups in a single
large congregation.

Even if none of our unprogrammed meetings
approach the size of these mammoth congregations in terms of membership, this
model may be a useful way for meetings to try venturing into the risky
territory of loving mutual accountability.Certainly it is much more possible to experience the sense
of safety, of being personally known at the core, and of being touched by God's
love in an ongoing group of 6-10 than even in a modestly sized meeting as a
whole.The richest experiences I
personally have had of tender accountability have been in the context of small
ongoing cell groups of this type.

SOME CLOSING QUERIES

What are the "frontier areas" that you
know of individual Friends today being led to take stands which may be hard for
many Friends to support?

What do you see as possible new
"testimonies" emerging among Friends in the 21st century?War tax resistance?Unity with nature?A stronger commitment to simple
lifestyle given the terrible impact which over-consumption has both on
environmental integrity in planting the "seeds of war"?

Are there actions which our meetings, yearly
meetings and Quaker organizations could be taking today to live out what we
believe in the peace testimony or other core testimonies?

Does our peace testimony mean anything at all
when our membership in this country is living at a standard of wealth so
distant from that of most of the world's inhabitants, sowing the seeds enormous
future conflicts?

How are our meetings communicating their ideals
to our young people?Do our
younger members know anything at all about the stands taken by older members of
our meetings during periods such as the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam War?

Has the pendulum swung too far from corporate
discipline to individualism?Do we
in fact stand for anything as Friends today? (I am thinking especially of
FGC and other unprogrammed Friends.) Are we truly "members of one
another" in any sense?Do we
want to be?

What will it take to raise up public ministers
among us today who will communicate powerfully and effectively to the world around
us an alternative vision of a peaceable kingdom shaped by the living Spirit of
God?